Robin DiAngelo
About the author

Robin DiAngelo

Academic: I received my PhD in Multicultural Education from the University of Washington in Seattle in 2004. I earned tenure at Westfield State University in Massachusetts. Currently I am Affiliate Associate Professor of Education at the University of Washington, Seattle. In addition, I hold two Honorary Doctoral Degrees. My area of research is in Whiteness Studies and Critical Discourse Analysis, tracing how whiteness is reproduced in everyday narratives.  I am a two-time winner of the Student’s Choice Award for Educator of the Year at the University of Washington’s School of Social Work. I have numerous publications and books, including Is Everybody Really Equal?: An Introduction to Key Concepts in Critical Social Justice Education, co-written with Özlem Sensoy, and which received both the American Educational Studies Association Critics Choice Book Award (2012) and the Society of Professors of Education Book Award (2018). In 2011 I coined the term White Fragility in an academic article which influenced the international dialogue on race. My book, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard For White People To Talk About Racism was released in June of 2018 and debuted on the New York Times Bestseller List where it remained for 85 weeks. It is currently being translated into 5 languages.Professional: I have been a consultant, educator and facilitator for over 20 years on issues of racial and social justice. I have worked with a wide-range of organizations including private, non-profit, and governmental.Personal: “I grew up poor and white.  While my class oppression has been relatively visible to me, my race privilege has not.  In my efforts to uncover how race has shaped my life, I have gained deeper insight by placing race in the center of my analysis and asking how each of my other group locations have socialized me to collude with racism. In so doing, I have been able to address in greater depth my multiple locations and how they function together to hold racism in place. I now make the distinction that I grew up poor and white, for my experience of poverty would have been different had I not been white” (DiAngelo, 2006).

Books by Robin DiAngelo